‘Elgar Brothers’, the music shop at 10 High Street, Worcester, became a mounting embarrassment to Elgar as his composing confidence increased and he aspired to a higher social position. Retail trade might have been acceptable as background to his Helen Weaver engagement. But there were rumours also of a connection with Sarah-Anne Wilkinson Newholme made while staying with Dr Charles Buck in Yorkshire, then of an attempted engagement to Gertrude Walker, musical daughter of the rector and squire at Abbots Norton, with whom Elgar shared many a concert platform, and who went on to breed dogs and become local secretary of the British Shakespeare Society. Above all there was Alice Roberts, a major-general's daughter born in India, whose social concerns in her early writings became rather, after her marriage to Elgar on 8 May 1889, a determination to raise her composer husband out of the sphere he was born in. Occasionally Elgar's mother might visit the home of the couple; occasionally the father would be summoned to tend a piano; but there is no record of the parents being invited together. To anticipate the Gerontius premiere, F. G. Edwards of the Musical Times planned a major article on Elgar. Alice Elgar, in a letter to Edwards of 18 September 1900, put her foot down firmly on certain matters, and notably the ‘shop’; ‘Then as E. has nothing to do with the business in Worcester would you please leave out details which do not affect him&with which he has nothing to do – His interests being quite unconnected with business.’